Lewis Fry Richardson

Richardson was an English mathematician, physicist and Quaker who set out to test Vilhelm Bjerknes' idea that weather could be predicted by solving the equations of motion numerically. Working largely alone, he spent years hand-calculating a six-hour forecast for a single location from May 1910 observations, publishing the attempt in 1922 as Weather Prediction by Numerical Process. The forecast itself was wildly wrong, undone by unfiltered noise in the data, but the method was sound, and it became the direct ancestor of the computer-based forecasting adopted a generation later.